1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for checking compliance of application components with the application domain in which the application is intended to be developed on. More specifically, the present invention relates to a method and apparatus for implementing a suite of compatibility test associated with components used by an application. Still more particularly, the present invention relates to a method for identifying only the necessary components needed for an application and the best possible compatibility test for each of the components.
2. Description of Related Art
Object oriented technology allows for very good componentization of software elements. This lends a high degree of configurability to systems that are built out of these components. As application domains become defined, standard collections of components can be created to form "platforms". A platform connotes the existence of a well-defined collection of components that others can use for application development. For instance, businness JAVA.TM. is a platform that contains a great deal of JAVA.TM. components, which are expected to always be available. To ensure that these components are available and that they behave correctly a compatibility test suite can be created. This suite typically implements a set of applications that exercise the components associate with the platform. If the test suite passes then the components have shown to exist and behave correctly.
A more heterogeneous environment, such as embedded devices, poses some problems with this platform approach. The desire is to still use object oriented technology (in fact it poses some real advantages in this space) and define a set of components that address the wide variety of heterogeneous requirements. This implies that there may be a large collection of platforms to address the heterogeneity. A complication arises from this. A single compliance test is no longer possible.